Individuals receive information and entertainment content from a wide variety of media sources. These sources include radio, newspapers, the Internet, and television content providers.
To support the creation and distribution of content, providers must derive revenue from the content. For example, television content providers derive substantial revenues from advertising. During the broadcast of a television program, advertisements, in the form of commercials, are inserted at various time intervals. An advertiser pays the broadcaster to insert the advertisement. Other sources of revenue include pay-per-view, subscription, and licensing fees paid by subscribers for specific content or content-related packages. Internet content providers derive revenue in similar ways.
The amount of money that an advertiser pays is related to the number of subscribers watching or accessing a broadcast. Conventionally, for television advertising, advertising revenue equals a rate per thousand viewers multiplied by the number of viewers estimated to be viewing a program. Web site content providers charge advertisers a fixed amount per advertising impression. Also, Pay-per-view, subscriptions, and licensing fees all increase as the number of viewers of content increase. Therefore, the higher the number of viewers or subscribers accessing content, the greater the revenue.
In the case of television programming, if a program is popular, the provider charges a higher advertising rate. In contrast, if a television program cannot produce at least as much revenue as it costs to produce the program, the provider will generally cancel the program. Therefore, television-programming providers are very interested in determining the popularity of specific programs.
Additional factors beyond the popularity of a program may affect the number of viewers who watch it. For example, a program scheduled adjacent to a popular program or between two popular programs may attain higher ratings than it might achieve without such opportune scheduling. A similar effect occurs on web sites. A large number of web site users may read content posted on a popular web site. However the same piece appearing on a less popular site may attract little attention. Therefore, content providers are interested in determining the interrelationships between various combinations of content and content types.
Conventional television programs and programming packages are designed to appeal, to the extent possible, to a large group of individual subscribers. Appealing to a large number of subscribers requires compromises that may lessen the appeal of a particular program or programming package to any one individual subscriber. And the less the appeal of a particular programming package to a subscriber, the less the subscriber will pay for the package. These same compromises are required when an advertiser produces a marketing campaign for use in television or creates a marketing bundle, which combines a programming or advertising package with products and services.
Content providers conventionally utilize various methods to evaluate the popularity of content and to evaluate the interrelationships between content. For example, a television-programming provider may implement a program of voluntary logging of television viewing by a viewer, followed by transmission and human processing to analyze the information contained in the log. In addition, a provider may utilize telephone, mail, or other types of surveys to inquire from random or selected viewers about the viewers' viewing habits and request their recollections regarding their viewing patterns. A provider may also utilize automated monitoring systems that attempt to intercept television channel choices and changes, record these events, and provide the recording to a clearinghouse or other facility for further processing.
The provider may enlist a ratings company to perform the monitoring and processing. For example, Nielsen Media Research (Nielsen Media Research, Inc., New York, N.Y.), Arbitron (Arbitron Inc., New York, N.Y.), and MeasureCast (MeasureCast, Inc., Portland, Oreg.) provide third-party monitoring and processing capability for television, radio, and Internet content.
The Nielsen Media Research (Nielsen) Ratings are perhaps the best known of the various third-party ratings services. Nielsen utilizes a variety of conventional sampling methods to determine the number of viewers watching a particular show. For example, in five thousand homes, Nielsen installs a People Meter. The People Meter records viewing patterns from television sets, cable television set-top boxes, videocassette recorders, satellite television set-top boxes, and other sources of television programming. The People Meter records what content the particular device is providing on an ongoing basis and periodically transmits this information to servers within a Nielsen facility. Nielsen combines the data uploaded from the People Meter with media content data to determine what programming and advertising a device displayed. Nielsen uses the combined data to provide a rating for each program and advertisement. In conjunction with the People Meter, Nielsen also utilizes viewer diaries and surveys to gather information from a broader spectrum of television viewers and to confirm the results generated by the People Meter.
Arbitron Inc. (Arbitron) is well known for providing radio broadcast ratings. Arbitron compiles ratings by utilizing surveys. Arbitron also provides television ratings based on various sampling techniques. In cooperation with Nielsen, Arbitron has developed a Portable People Meter to measure television ratings. The Portable People Meter is a pager-sized device, worn by a participant in a survey. The Portable People Meter records viewing by recording sounds encoded into each broadcast, which identify the program or advertisement. The survey participant periodically plugs the Portable People Meter into a recharger, which also includes a communicator that uploads the data in the Portable People Meter into a remote Arbitron server. The Portable People Meter may be a more accurate method of television ratings than a set-top box, such as the set-top box used by Nielsen. The Portable People Meter offers the advantage of capturing viewing outside of the home and of recognizing when the viewer is not within audible range of a television, and therefore, less likely to be viewing a particular program or advertisement.
As the use of the Internet increases, the distribution of programming via Internet channels becomes more important. MeasureCast, Inc. (MeasureCast) provides a ratings system for Internet media streaming. MeasureCast records the number of streams requested from a streaming server and provides reports to programming providers and advertisers detailing the popularity of particular streams. As is the case in traditional broadcast media, the more popular the stream, the higher the advertising rate a broadcaster is able to charge.
Nielsen, Arbitron, and MeasureCast provide direct methods of measuring the popularity of a program. Various indirect methods are also used to determine the popularity of programming and the effectiveness of advertising. For example, advertising effectiveness is often measured in terms of viewer attitudes and subsequent viewer actions, such as purchases, inquiries, behavior changes, and other actions. Method of obtaining these indirect measures include: focus group tests, post-advertising surveys questioning whether an advertisement was viewed, remembered and possible impact, and measures of product purchases or other indirect results that may indicate whether or not an advertising campaign has been successful.
Conventional systems and methods for determining subscriber content-access patterns and preferences are inefficient and poorly suited for the immediate, timely creation of customized content. In addition, conventional systems, such as the Nielsen and Arbitron meters rely on extremely small samples, which may not be representative of the target market for a particular advertiser.
Also, surveys are expensive and highly dependent on identifying individuals that may have been viewing television at the time of the advertisement. And post-advertising results measurements suffer from questions of causality and external influences. Focus groups allow reasonably efficient low-volume viewer analysis, but statistical analysis requires an adequate number of participants and tightly controlled tests, a combination that may be difficult to achieve.
Conventional systems and methods lack simple, effective, and efficient means for determining content genre preferences. Conventional systems and methods also lack simple and efficient means for determining the duration of viewing patterns, especially as those patterns are affected by the genre or type of content, the time-of-day of a broadcast, and the content broadcast simultaneously with or adjacently to the content of interest.